Discover practical tools for personal leadership training in healthcare — learning how to make aligned decisions, build resilience in high-pressure settings, and choose response over reaction through embodied awareness.
Moving From Your Internal Yes
If you work in healthcare, you know that requests come fast. And sometimes with incomplete information, conflicting needs, and emotional intensity all mixed together.
Before you know it you default to what’s expected — the “shoulds” that seem responsible or efficient. But decisions made from “shoulds” can compromise your own alignment. You might notice a dissonance in your feelings and an awkwardness in your actions. That probably means that your ‘yes’ is driven from external pressure rather than grounded response.
Doing that frequently throughout your work days eats away your body budget — the total amount of energy you have available throughout your day.
This month’s Embodiment Lab explored what that means in practice: how to listen for your internal yes — not as an abstract idea, but as something you can actually feel.
The Body Knows Before the Mind
Interoception is a key element of getting to know yourself a little better. It’s the ability to sense your internal state. Embodied signals tell you what’s going on inside. In high-pressure settings like healthcare, the complexity and the pace pushes you into your head. Being in your head disconnects you from information that is key to managing your energy level and aliveness.
Your body always reacts to the environment. A subtle opening in the chest when something aligns — or a tightening in the gut when it doesn’t — is present before your mind can analyze what’s happening. Practicing embodied awareness will help you shift from automatic reactions that can sacrifice your alignment and energy level, to more conscious responses.
We call that shifting from react-ability to response-ability. It gives you personal agency over your wellbeing as a healthcare professional. Incorporating embodied awareness helps you make decisions that honor your limits and align with your values, even under pressure, right in the middle of your workday.
Finding Your Circle of Alignment
Our monthly Embodiment Lab is a way to continuously train opening or deepening embodied awareness. The labs are both for people that are new to embodied awareness and for those already familiar with the practice. This month’s Lab explored experiencing our felt sense of alignment. Being aligned grounds you in your own ‘yes’ and is an important signal, or compass, that helps you direct your own well-being.
The body and mind have a brilliant way of interacting together. In our Labs we capitalize on this collaboration to learn about ourselves and the resources available to us. Combining imagination, visualisation and direct embodied experiences provide unique, effective and engaging tools that help us understand ourselves and provide an opportunity to shift how we interact with the world in a way that serves us better.
Using imagination, participants stepped into their “circle of alignment”. We visualized a space where values, grounding, and presence meet. A place where we feel open and can just be. Inside that circle, we connect more deeply to the things that are important to us, we care about and that serve us. This is not an egocentric serving but a realization of our own personal truth.
Alignment As a Compass
Recall a request that compromised your own alignment.
What do you notice inside?
An Aligned Internal Yes May Show Up As an External No.
“It feels like in this place it is easier and clearer for me to know what feels ‘right’ or ‘wrong’”, said one participant. “It grounds me. And surprisingly, I feel more powerful.”
Participants’ biggest revelation from this month’s Lab was discovering that from quiet certainty an internal “yes” answer could actually be a wholehearted “no”.
In a way, though, is that surprising?
When we check in with the body more frequently we feel what matters to us, and what it is that doesn’t feel ‘right’. A “yes” (or “no” for that matter) that emerges when we are in alignment is different from a “yes” driven by circumstance.
A Quick Practice: Sensing Your True Yes
You can do this exercise while driving your car, walking to the supermarket, or brushing your teeth.
Ask yourself:
- How does my internal yes, my personal truth, feel? And where does it live in my body?
- What words would describe that feeling best? (building emotional granularity)
The goal isn’t to decide something, but to practice sensing into your inner signals — the subtle cues that guide authentic, sustainable action.
Over time, this kind of interoceptive awareness builds confidence in your internal compass, helping you act with clarity even when circumstances are unpredictable.
Bringing It Into Your Workday
Embodied awareness doesn’t require an extra hour in your schedule. It lives in the moments between patients, before meetings, during transitions.
The first step is to create awareness of bodily sensations. Do they make you contract of feel more spacious?
Integrate this awareness into your day:
- Check in when you get a request. What is your body’s response? Is your aligned yes compromised?
- If so, take a deep breath, center and feel what your response should be from this aligned place.
These practices help cultivate resilience in high-pressure settings — a skill that not only supports you, but also the quality of care you bring to others.
Listening to the Body’s Yes in Daily Life
In the end, embodiment isn’t about getting it right. It’s about noticing — what your body is telling you, what feels aligned with your personal truth and integrity, or what might need a pause.
Listening to your body’s yes is a quiet act of personal leadership. It reconnects you with your values, helps you navigate uncertainty, and lets your actions arise from clarity instead of reactivity.
That’s how confidence grows — not from knowing every answer, but from trusting the wisdom that’s already within you.
Karin Karis & Kimberly Woodland
Founders of Body Comes to Mind
We’re occupational therapists, embodiment practitioners, aikido teachers, coaches, and facilitators. But more than that—we’re two people deeply committed to creating spaces where others can come home to themselves.
We bring decades of experience in healthcare, somatic practice, trauma-informed training, and leadership development.
We love working with people who care about making a difference, and want to do that with sustainability, integrity, and joy.
References for Finding Your Internal Yes
- Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.
- Barrett, Lisa Feldman. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.
- Balconi, Michela M. “Uncertainty and Anticipation in Anxiety.” PubMed Central.
- Mental Health Center Kids: “The Circle of Concern” explanation and activities.
- Solano Durán Paola, Morales Juan-Pablo, Huepe David. “Interoceptive awareness in a clinical setting: the need to bring interoceptive perspectives into clinical evaluation.” Frontiers in Psychology
Body Comes to Mind provides EMBODIED skills and practices to the globe through online courses, skills labs & workshops to enable people to take care of themselves while caring for others.
